The Fall of Voodoo

DooKey

DooKey

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Remember when GLQuake hit the scene? For us old timers it seems like it was just yesterday. I don't know about anybody else, but that game and technology grabbed a hold of me and made me a gaming fiend for many years. The Voodoo graphics card that drove that game was a godsend for gamers used to bland 2D gaming and ushered in an era of 3d gaming goodness that still continues today. So what happened to 3Dfx and why aren't we still gaming on their products today? Here's another take on the subject and one worth reading if you are interested in the history of 3D gaming/technology.

Strangely, 3Dfx didn’t so much draw interest as blow the lid off of a trend that redefined how we think of video games. Its graphics processing units were just the right technology for their time. And, for that reason, the company was everywhere for a few years … until it wasn’t. So, what happened-why did 3Dfx turn into a cautionary tale?
 
I remember it well. GLQuake was mind-blowing.

Small update: I had a Diamond Monster 3D Voodoo 4MB card paired with a Matrox Millennium. This must have been around 1997 or 1998. It was good times to be a PC gamer. Back then it seemed like I was upgrading or building a new gaming rig every year.
 
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I had the rare 6mb Canopus Pure 3d version of the Voodoo1. I bough it in Europe though, and there it was marketed as the Miro Hiscore 3d.

It was actually my second 3D card. My first was the first gen Matrox Mystique. It had very limited title support though, and came nowhere near the performance of the voodoo1. It really only ever worked well on the titles it shipped with. There were a few patches for other games to add support as well, but they were few and far between. There was some motorcycle game which I was impressed by for the time as it was the first time I had seen smoothly rendered 3d frames, but I can't remember what it was called. MechWarrior 2 was probably the only title I really enjoyed that had Matrox Mystique hardware rendering support.

When it died 11 months into my 1 year "money back no questions asked" warranty, I happily traded it for my Voodoo1.

The rest is history.
 
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I still have my 3dfx hat. I always wear it at LAN parties because it gets attention and starts conversations.

I never had a 3dfx card. I followed the Matrox Millenium line of GPU's up until Half-Life. I needed OpenGL for Half-Life and Matrox's cards did not support it. The card which replaced the Matrox Millenium G200 was a Hercules Prophet II GTS Pro 64 MB
 
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I bought a 3dfx Voodoo 2 in a mall in Portland, Oregon. (No sales tax.) Ice rink in the mall. Forget the name of the shop, but the salesman (young guy) told me how envious he was that I was buying it. It was the 1080 of its day. ;)
 
I'll never forget the first time I saw GLQuake. I ordered an Orchid Righteous 3D from my local mom & pop shop immediately afterward. It was up there with Super Mario Brothers and the first FMV games on the all time "Wow - I didn't know that was possible!" list.
 
The good ol' days. Voodoo1 4MB > Voodoo2 12MB > 2 x Voodoo2 12MB > Obsidian X24 because it was neat.
 
Had a 3dfx card at some point. Voodoo 3 IIRC. Think it wound up in the cull pile I gave to a friend who was building computers out of spare parts for his less fortunate family members.
Having good stuff early in the game doesn't always equal long term success. Hercules, CompuServe, Yahoo for other examples.
 
Was it the voodoo 5 that went off the rails? It had like 4 gpu chips and the biggest feature was to blur, blur and then blur some more?
It went kinda stupid nuts at that point.
 
some 2d though was amazing:
a. ultima online
b. heroes quest / quest for glory
c. super mario

I would kill for those games in high def 2d. ... when game developers did real art. not bulk 3d purchased models like in some games... 3d is great or its really cheesy/bad. Often 3d you cant even make out what it is in the background.
 
I didn't get a 3dfx card until my parents finally got me a voodoo 3 2000 for my birthday. Before then we had some of the early ati rage cards....ick. rage 2c 4mb and a rage pro 8mb I think. Awful cards compared to the v3.
 
I had a bear of a time getting a pair of Voodoo2 cards to run EQ1 correctly back in the day. I still have the pair and the cables in a box in the closet. :LOL:
 
Voodoo2 12 meg was the first I could afford. Never could afford SLI.

Sometimes I'd just walk around in Quake with godmode on, typing "timerefresh" randomly while smiling.
 
The fall of 3DFX ? they were too good, and Nvidia pulled a Disney ( if you can't make something better, buy the competition )
 
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Gigus Fire said:
Was it the voodoo 5 that went off the rails? It had like 4 gpu chips and the biggest feature was to blur, blur and then blur some more?
It went kinda stupid nuts at that point.
Click to expand...

Well they were already going off the rails at that point, that was just the final death knell. They'd taken far too long to produce their new generation of hardware and competitors had exceeded them in a number of ways (such as 32-bit color support). When they did release it, it was't very impressive and was expensive. One of the issues is they were focusing too much on high end visualization systems for people like Obsidian and worked to make this architecture so you could have a lot of chips (supposedly up to 32). Ok that's neat and all, but too expensive and it doesn't scale well. Also they were pushing tech that nobody else was interested in. They figured that you'd want a lot of chips to do things like FSAA and motion blur (you render more frames than your output refresh rate and blend them together). People didn't because it was too much money, and things weren't fast enough for that (and still aren't really).

The final knockout was the GeForce 256. It was just way more powerful and was moving in the direction that the APIs were (hardware T&L). 3Dfx had no response, they'd been counting on the VSA-100 chip to carry them for some time, and that was that.
 
My father brought me home a creative branded 3dfx voodoo1 (may have been a 2) that came with virtua fighter... which I killed at the local arcade. It was still mind blowing to be doing it at home with a shitty logi controller!
 
Sorry, Voodoo dying was my fault. I invested $2000 in their stock not too long before they went kaput. =(
 
The reason 3Dfx died was because they were behind in tech. Plain and simple. Up to the Voodoo 3 they were still using 256x256 texture sizes while the TNT2 can use 2kx2k. By the time the Geforce was out, the Voodoo 4 cards couldn't do T&L. They did have AA, and the best AA at the time, but without T&L the Voodoo 4 cards were massively behind. This also applied to the PowerVR cards at the time as they had Tile Based Rendering which is a new addition to both AMD and Nvidia, but they had no T&L.

And of course Nvidia bought 3Dfx and created the disastrous GeforceFX cards.
 
Those were fun times. I was still in college. I bought a Monster 3d and GLQuake changed everything - it was amazing. When the Voodoo2 was announced, I bought 2 so I could do SLI. (Still in college - no sure where I got the money from now...I did work, but also was paying my way through college, anyway...)
I don't remember if I ever bought the Voodoo 3. At some point, I switched to a Radeon 9700. However, good chance there was a card or two between the Voodoo days and the Radeon.
 
I preordered an Orchid Righteous 3D, it came with some demos and a coupon for MechWarrrior2 (shipped latter). GLQuake really opened things up. Jumped to SLI Voodoo2's, etc. I was hoping for a Rampage (external power supply reqd) but the company shut down. 3DFX was working AA and filtering while the others were still chasing fps at the time.
 
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My first card was a Riva128. That card was terribly slow and I didnt like it. I bought a voodoo1 diamond card after that and the difference was night and day.
 
I still have a voodoo 1 and a voodoo 5 , sadly i sold my voodoo 2 sli back in the day to buy a voodoo 3 i think

20180215_124404.jpg
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
There was some motorcycle game which I was impressed by for the time as it was the first time I had seen smoothly rendered 3d frames, but I can't remember what it was called.
Click to expand...

MotoRacer maybe? I played that game SO much I swore I could have ridden a real one. :ROFLMAO:

I had the original Matrox millennium and had bought the Mystique for my then girlfriends computer. Was fun times.
 
Had a voodoo1 and then chipped in for SLI on the voodoo2. I remember playing Everquest in 1024x768 glory when it came out!
 
Canopus Pure 3D 6MB Voodoo 1 ran 1024X768 350 dollars for a video card seemed insane at the time... imagine that lol. I later owned Voodoo Banshee and Voodoo 3 PCI and AGP. Then moved to Geforce 1 DDR-DVI.
 
While not my first 3D card, I was one of the early adapters for the Voodoo 1 and then bought a Voodoo 2. Never went SLI, so I was stuck @ 800x600 for my games, but I could finally play games at a solid 30 FPS!
 
While I loved my Voodoo1, I was always kind of annoyed at the loss of 2d desktop quality the passthrough cable for it introduced.

I had the best 2d SVGA card on the market in the Matrox Millennium, but because of my Voodoo1 my desktop got a bit blurry.

I was always toying with the idea of getting some sort of switch or relay to eliminate the problem, yet even though I kept that setup for way too long (I went straight from a Pre-MMX Pentium 150@200mhz with a Voodoo1 to a Duron 650 and a GeForce 2 GTS in the fall of 2000) I never got around to dealing with that issue.
 
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Voodoo Blaster Banshee PCI was my first card. I slapped it into my parents PII 233mmx in an AT case.
 
Montu said:
Remember when GLQuake hit the scene? For us old timers it seems like it was just yesterday. I don't know about anybody else, but that game and technology grabbed a hold of me and made me a gaming fiend for many years. The Voodoo graphics card that drove that game was a godsend for gamers used to bland 2D gaming and ushered in an era of 3d gaming goodness that still continues today. So what happened to 3Dfx and why aren't we still gaming on their products today? Here's another take on the subject and one worth reading if you are interested in the history of 3D gaming/technology.

Strangely, 3Dfx didn’t so much draw interest as blow the lid off of a trend that redefined how we think of video games. Its graphics processing units were just the right technology for their time. And, for that reason, the company was everywhere for a few years … until it wasn’t. So, what happened-why did 3Dfx turn into a cautionary tale?
Click to expand...


I'll never forget, on this very forum, some jerk off claiming he was an employee at 3dfx, and the buyout rumors were 100% not true.


30 minutes later - official news release from 3dfx and nvidia. LOOOOOL. Maybe he was janitor?
 
Verge said:
I'll never forget, on this very forum, some jerk off claiming he was an employee at 3dfx, and the buyout rumors were 100% not true.


30 minutes later - official news release from 3dfx and nvidia. LOOOOOL. Maybe he was janitor?
Click to expand...


Well, I've been at companies during mergers and acquisitions. Usually there things are extremely tight lipped until they are made public. Outside of top management or those directly involved with the talks or providing information to be used for them, no one in either company knows anything about it at all.

Those who are involved are sworn to secrecy until made public as leaking significant information that could affect the stock price prior to being made public is in many (most/all?) cases illegal.

The guy could have been full of shit, or he could have been honest and just not aware of top managements ongoing negotiations.
 
Got a few cards as hand-me-downs from my brother. Primarily used a Voodoo3 3500 TV, had a Voodoo Banshee in another system (tiny passive heatsink was hot as hell), and a Voodoo2 paired with a Matrox Millenium G200.

I wanted to get a second Voodoo2 and mod a floppy cable to do SLI, but never got around doing it. By that time 3DFX was already long gone.
 
I actually forgot my ghetto mod of my Voodoo 1 for overclocking.

I took an old 486 HSF I had kicking around and using a hair tie I stole from my mom and so e of that white silicon paste I strapped that thing to the main core on my Voodoo 1. I recall it allowing me to up the clocks much higher without artifacting or crashes than without it. I can't remember any of the clocks anymote though.

It was really amusing during my freshman year at college in '99 all the rich kids parents bought them brand new computers for school from Best buy, and none of them could understand why my ghetto old beaten up PC was performing so much better during our floor wide Quake2 battles.
 
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